Having (ahem, finally) taken care of the unfinished business from days of yore, I was able to get to what I actually wanted to do. Meet Wobble Squares, my first small effort at a more improvisational quilt. It is also my first effort at applique since I was 10 years old and playing around with hand-sewing fabrics on pillows.
Other quilters seem to have these nice photogenic situations for their quilts--a sunlit corner of a reasonably uncluttered room, a clothesline hanging outside against a shingled house, etc. For now, I lack these things so we all get to admire my bland apartment carpet.
The top picture is of the front, the bottom picture is of the back...and as is frequently the case with modern quilts, I find myself drawn to the back. It's made to work either way, so no problem.
When I'm playing with ideas that are new (or at least, new to me) I like to do it with quilts of this size, as they are much easier to handle in a standard home machine and they finish up faster too. More contemporary qualities include a pieced back, deliberate imprecision on the "squares" (they're really rectangles) so you get the "wobble," and ... a 100% machine stitched binding! |
| machine sewing a binding...it's really not so bad |
We are used to what a machine-stitched hem on a pair of pants looks like: a machine stitched binding is basically similar. Some people reading this may even be thinking "what does a hand-stitched hem look like?" because they've never seen one. Exactly.
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| attempt #3 at the dreaded binding closure |
...and over here to our right, is the other reason why quilters go ABB--the geometry to finish it off. There is a simpler way to do it but it's not quite as nice. I suppose it's funny that I'm machine stitching a binding and then worrying about bulk on the seam when it's closed, but for this quilt at least, that's how I felt about it. I still have to look up how to do it each and every time.
